Google Debuts 'Smartphone Errors' Tool

December 5, 2013

By Developer.com Staff

Recognizing the increasing importance of mobile commerce, Google is rolling out a new tool designed to help web developers better serve people using smartphones. The company's Webmaster Tools now features a tab dedicated to "Smartphone Errors."

"Some smartphone-optimized Websites are misconfigured in that they don't show searchers the information they were seeking," explained Google's Pierre Far. "For example, smartphone users are shown an error page or get redirected to an irrelevant page, but desktop users are shown the content they wanted. Some of these problems, detected by Googlebot as crawl errors, significantly hurt your Website's user experience and are the basis of some of our recently announced ranking changes for smartphone search results."

The new tab identifies errors detected by Googlebot for smartphones so that developers can fix them.